Nationalism and the International Labor Movement

When communism fell and nationalism surged back across Europe, many concluded that the socialist tradition had simply never understood the nation. Michael Forman argues otherwise. Returning to the major thinkers of the international labour movement, socialist and anarchist alike, he shows how seriously they wrestled with national feeling, and answers both the charge that the radical left ignored nationalism and the charge that it reduced everything to economics.

Forman traces the tensions between ethnic and civic ideas of nationality, the claims of national self-determination and the place of republican institutions, then carries the argument into an age of globalisation, drawing on social theory and Kant's thinking on cosmopolitan right. Written from the vantage of the post-Soviet years, it is a careful, scholarly study for readers of political theory and the history of the left who want the arguments taken on their own terms.